Marco Guidi did an entire study of texts around the world. looked at the evolutions of US textbooks to the 1930s in:
“The Evolution of US Textbooks” in The Economic Reader: Textbooks, Manuals and the Dissemination of the Economic Sciences during the 19th and Early 20th Centuries. (Massimo Augello and Marco Guidi, editors). Routledge, 2012.
“What We Taught and what we did: The Evolution of US Economic Textbooks (1830-1930)” Il Pensiero Economico Italiano XIV 2006
In “God, Man, and Lorie Tarshis at Yale” , in Omar Hamuda (ed.) Keynesianism and the Keynesian Revolution in America, Edward Elgar, 1998, Harry Landreth and I look at Lorie's book which was the first Keynesian book in the US--it got attacked by the Veritas Society and W. Buckley and its sales died--Samuelson was also attacked but less so. We argue that those attacks played an important role in the scientific framing of economics in the Samuelson and post Samuelson texts.
Dave
________________________________
From: Societies for the History of Economics [[log in to unmask]] on behalf of Dan Hirschman [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Wednesday, December 17, 2014 3:20 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: [SHOE] Early 20th Century Principles of Economics Texts
Dear SHOE,
I'm working on an analysis of introductory economics textbooks published in the United States between about 1890 and 1950 (the period between Marshall and Samuelson, roughly). I've accumulated an ad hoc collection of texts based on the holdings of my library and scattered references in the secondary literature (Elzinga 1992, Walstad et al 1998, and Giraud 2013 in particular), but I was hoping that there might be some more systematic way to generate a universe of texts from which to sample. Does anyone have a recommendation for a good source that discusses principles texts in this period, perhaps with information on relative influence (number of editions, course adoptions, or sales)? Does such a source exist?
Thanks very much!
Dan Hirschman
PhD Candidate
Department of Sociology
University of Michigan
|